May 18, 2010
Holy crap, we’ve got robot avatars now There’s a big meeting across the country. What do you do? 1960: You fly there. 1980: You have a conference call. 2000: You do a video conference. 2010: You fire up your robot avatar at the location. Pardon? Yep, it’s for real, folks. A company called Anybots has created a prototype of a robot that will serve as a person’s physical presence in a remote location. You log in through the Internet and after a few keystrokes the ‘bot, called QB, comes alive, leaving its charging station and ready to meet, brainstorm, greet visitors or just generally creep people out.
May 17, 2010
Talk about taking your work home with you. In this example, bride Satoko Inoue, who works for the company that created the i-Fairy robot, married her client Tomohiro Shibata yesterday—with the i-Fairy acting as registrar to the couple. More » http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/05/160x120_robot-couple.jpg Robotics – Tokyo – Japan – Satoko Inoue – Robot
May 14, 2010
Though men are stereotyped as gadget hounds, information technology actually brings more happiness to women worldwide. A new study (PDF) from UK-based BCS—The Chartered Institute for IT analyzes 35,000 responses from the World Values Survey to make the case that IT actually makes people happier. Read the rest of this article… Read the comments on this post
May 12, 2010
I decided to start importing my Google Reader shared items directly into this blog using FeedWordPress. The reason for this change is that my blog has always served as a repository for examples and material to use in class. Currently my shared items are broadcast only through Reader itself, and through Buzz, but everyone I tell to use Buzz looks at me like a cultist. In any case, it would be nice to have access to the material without signing into my Google account. That means a lot of stuff posted here won’t be my own writing, but it will be clearly marked as not my own, and will be tagged as autoblogging. I’ll still post my own occasionally, but it would be nice to have my blog active in at least some capacity instead of just sitting dead. I used to import my blog posts onto Facebook, but I don’t want to overload the news stream with my shared items, so I’ve stopped importing into Facebook. That means when I write a post by hand, I’ll have to bring it to Facebook manually; but that’s ok because I’m not writing much anymore anyway. And I don’t expect Facebook to stick around much longer. This might result in some of my (two) readers receiving multiple copies of my posts in various media streams. If it is annoying and there is anything I can do to help it, let me know.
May 12, 2010
Try not to get dizzy watching this projector strapped to a Wii-gun I didn’t think I was one to get motion sick, but this projector strapped to a Wii-gun is making me think otherwise. Gamer Nirav Patel decided to take first-person shooting to the next level by combining a Wiimote Zapper, a handheld ShowWX laser projector and a gyrometer to display a screen wherever his Zapper is pointing. Patel calls it a “glasses-free virtual reality first-person shooter,” and it allows him to look around and navigate the game-world just by angling the Zapper and using its joystick. Right now, it’s all a little unwieldy as the game (an open-source FPS called “Cube”) is running off of Patel’s laptop, which his controller is tethered to. That laptop? Patel’s wearing it on his back, Ghostbusters-style. Check it out in the video down below. Eclecticc, via Hack-A-Day, via Joystiq
May 12, 2010
ermany-based Otto Bock Healthcare has announced that its prototype prosthetic arm which can be controlled by thought is ready to hit the market. The device has been in testing on Christian Kandlbauer — who doesn’t have any arms and has a conventional prosthetic on his right side — for the past four years. He’s the first person in Europe to have a thought-controlled prosthesis installed, but the research is complete and the finished product should soon be available to the public. The arm makes use of targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR), which uses nerves that controlled the lost arm to control the prosthesis. The nerves are transplanted to the chest in a six-hour operation and enable the prosthetic control. The full details of the arm’s operation and controls have yet to be unveiled, but hit up the source link for more information. Mind-controlled prosthetic arm moving to market in Europe originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 12 May 2010 15:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | source BBC | Email this | Comments
May 4, 2010
If you’ve read enough of the reporting on the completion of genomes, you’ll invariably come across a science writer who has compared the genome to the operating system of the cell. Apparently, a team of researchers from Yale decided to take the metaphor seriously. They built a call graph of the Linux kernel, and compared that to the gene regulation network of the gut bacterium E. coli. Given that the two serve radically different purposes, it should come as no surprise that the layouts look radically different—but the real surprise may be that there are so many intriguing points of comparison. We’ll take a look at each of the two systems in turn. To create a graph of the E. coli gene regulatory network, the authors divided up genes into three categories. Some genes don’t do any regulation; they perform a structural or metabolic function and only receive input from the regulators. These were defined as workhorses, and placed at the foundation of the graph. Other genes participate in regulatory networks, receiving input from their peers, and controlling both workhorses and other regulators—these were termed middle managers. Finally, a few master regulators sit on top of the hierarchy and only regulate other genes. Read the rest of this article… Read the comments on this post